39. Yeah, AG Eric Holder.

Just watching United States Attorney General Eric Holder during his press conference on Tuesday remembering what it was like for him as a young black man in America whose father had to give him ‘the talk’ about how he should behave if ever he was stopped by the police was, I’m quite sure, a revelation to a large segment of the nation. And not the darker segment, because we already know. And as I watched him describe how he felt certain that his father didn’t think his son’s generation would likely have to give that same wise but fearful advice, and then how he wove that into the tragic verdict excusing George Zimmerman for murdering an unarmed black teenager, I couldn’t help but think about the fact that only a black man could offer that perspective on the verdict. No matter how sympathetic many of our white fellow citizens may be, only a black man can talk with authority about what this really means for young black men.

But more importantly, this wasn’t coming from some anonymous black man interviewed on the street. This opinion was coming from the nation’s top lawyer, the man who is in charge of the United States Justice Department. And this man talked about one night not all that long ago when he was stopped by the police in Georgetown as he was running to get to a movie – simply because he was running while black at night in Georgetown. He was a federal prosecutor at the time.